D&D General What is your favorite d&d world's one unique thing.

[zarionofarabel]

Dragonlance had Draconians (NOT Dragonborn) and lacked Orcs. I only had a couple PCs that fought Orcs as I stopped playing D&D not long after my group got the FR box set. Draconians will always be my chosen foe! Plus they did all the cool stuff when they died like trap my sword when they turned to stone, or melted it when they turned to acid, or they flipping exploded! Yeah, Draconians were so much cooler than Orcs!

 

[Gorck]

Which is world is your favorite and why is it not "generic fantasy world #35."

First, generic fantasy world #36 I far superior to #35. Everybody knows that!

Second, my favorite fantasy world to play in is Critical Role’s Exandria. It used to be the Forgotten Realms, but I found it to be too massive for me. I prefer the smaller, cozier continent of Wildemount, and there’s always Tal’Dorei if the group wants to explore further.

 

[overgeeked]

Can’t pick just one.

Dark Sun. Too many unique things to count. But most of them stem from either: metal is scarce, magic destroys the environment, or psionics are commonplace.

Spelljammer. D&D…in space!

Al-Qadim. D&D…in fantasy Arabia and North Africa.

Mystara. Again, too many unique things. But a favorite is the Hollow World.

Maztica. D&D…in South America.

Ravenloft. D&D…in horror. At least it was horror in 2E. Now it’s more like D&D in a cheap, secondhand Spirit Halloween costume.

Eberron. Low-level magic is commonplace and it combines action-adventure with noir. With just a little push you can do great Western-style games and with the slightest of repaint you can do great JRPG games.

 

[DragonLancer]

Classic Dragonlance - post War of the Lance and before the awful Chaos War nonsense. Krynn felt more romanticized fantasy over traditional dungeon crawling. That appealed so much to younger me for some reason. After they made sweeping changes the setting lost everything to me though.

 

[Voadam]

Ptolus I really like the collapsing henotheistic Holy Lothian Empire.

For D&D having a big church dedicated to an ascended paladin as the patron of the empire allows both medieval church themes with whatever D&D polytheism you want alongside it since it is henotheistic, So you have a great setup for D&D cleric stuff to make more sense, with both the christian knight themes and D&D Conan polytheism. The collapsing empire also allows a lot of things like outer areas breaking away for independence, decadence and corruption themes, religious schisms, civil war, established areas falling into points of light, etc. You can have the oppressive or enlightened empire if you want, or areas falling into chaos, a lot of options for the mood you want with a single core identity.

I really like it as a big part of my homebrew mashup setting.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Ptolus I really like the collapsing henotheistic Holy Lothian Empire.

For D&D having a big church dedicated to an ascended paladin as the patron of the empire allows both medieval church themes with whatever D&D polytheism you want alongside it since it is henotheistic, So you have a great setup for D&D cleric stuff to make more sense, with both the christian knight themes and D&D Conan polytheism. The collapsing empire also allows a lot of things like outer areas breaking away for independence, decadence and corruption themes, religious schisms, civil war, established areas falling into points of light, etc. You can have the oppressive or enlightened empire if you want, or areas falling into chaos, a lot of options for the mood you want with a single core identity.

I really like it as a big part of my homebrew mashup setting.

(TIL what henotheism means)

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Official settings, Eberron. Magitech.

I wish some of the magitech wasn’t so locked to specific organizations, like airships, but it’s fine I can just use that and an inventive PC or NPC ally to create conflict.

 

[Charlaquin]

Nentir Vale has an extremely tight metaphysical setup. Both its core pantheon and its extraplanar structure feels very purposeful and well designed. The flip side of that is that it’s really not very organic, so if you like that Gygaxian pseudo-naturalism, you won’t really find it in Nentir Vale. But if you like very intentional craftsmanship in your worldbuilding, that’s something NV offers, pretty uniquely among 1st party D&D settings.

Honorable mention to Dark Sun. It wouldn’t feel right to call it my favorite because honestly a lot of what I love about it is headcanon. I’m not that familiar with true Dark Sun canon, but the surface details are immaculate and extremely fertile ground for my own imagination to take root in. But if I’m honest what I love so much about it has more to do with the setting I imagined after that surface-level reading than with what’s actually written beyond the, what two 4e Dark Sun books, IIRC?

 

[jdrakeh]

Dragonmech for the, ah well, you probably guessed.

 

[Pale Violet Light]

Dragonmech for the, ah well, you probably guessed.

The changes to divine casters?